


Magic Tricks

by extree



Series: Dark Castle [4]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Dark Castle, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-09 01:48:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4329060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extree/pseuds/extree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rainy days in the Dark Castle have gotten Belle a little down. But then she begins to notice something a little strange, and rather distracting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magic Tricks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Foxmurphy](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Foxmurphy).



> Hello! This fic was inspired by the awesome [Foxmurphy](http://www.foxmurphy.tumblr.com)'s art. By [this drawing of Gold in a lovely sweater](http://foxmurphy.tumblr.com/post/102511926835) in particular, which I love, and have loved ever since I saw it months ago. She was kind enough to let me steal that neat little trick she came up with for the purpose of this fic, and I can't thank her enough for that. So thank you. Times a million. You're the best.

Belle didn’t mind rainy days. Sitting out in the courtyard in the sunshine with a book was nice, but so were blankets and a roaring fire. It was just that this was the tenth rainy day in a row, and she’d been feeling as grey as the clouds over the castle for a few days now. So much so that she doubted a ray of sunshine would have made a difference to her mood at all at that point. She felt a bit hollow. A bit homesick. Not like it was in the beginning, when being here alone hurt so much she cried herself a headache every single night. It was a stranger kind of homesick. 

Homesick for summers when she was little, picking flowers and plums from trees, devouring books about knights and witches and creaking ships on stormy seas. When she would lay on the soft grass, pulling at it until her fingers were stained, daydreaming of far away places and adventure, all the while safe within the walls of the castle grounds. It was always warm in her memories of home, of when she was too short to reach the duller books on the shelves in the library, and the light was always golden. The lower levels of the castle smelled delicious come dinner time. The cook would sneak her pieces of candied fruit if she lingered around the kitchen long enough. It could rain all day and all night for a week but she never felt sad. Couldn’t remember feeling sad, at least; she knew she must have, but those were not the memories that were haunting her on this rainy day in a castle that wasn’t hers.

That was all so long ago. Before she knew her father’s guards were always nearby whenever she thought she was alone with her books and her imagination, making sure no harm would come to her. Before her father grew serious and worried about things he wouldn’t explain to her. Before he told her she couldn’t play outside anymore, before the men in the castle began to look at her differently, before the war, before her betrothal, before her mother’s death. Before she came here and traded one set of castle walls for another and discovered that doing the brave thing didn’t feel as rewarding as the heroes in her books made it out to be.

She dusted, she did the laundry, she brewed the tea and prepared the baskets of straw like she always did. Just in silence, the last couple of days. She didn’t hum, didn’t ask Rumplestiltskin for a story, didn’t tell him about her books. The heavy fog that was draped over her like a thick blanket kept her to herself, stopped her from reaching out. And when the day’s work was done, she would go up to her room and sit there, maybe lie down on her bed, close her eyes, and try to feel better. She never let herself cry for too long.

Remarkably sensitive for a notoriously ruthless sorcerer, Rumplestiltskin was quick to pick up on her mood. All she had to do was let his bait lie just once - she ignored a little joke at her expense instead of sniping back - and somehow that was enough for him to realize. Perhaps not completely. Just… enough. To let her be. And it was nice at first. To be allowed to be sad, not to have to pretend that she was alright. The first few rainy days with her head stuck in the grey were good for her. But now…

She hadn’t heard her own voice since the night before, when she told Rumplestiltskin good night. She was tired of thinking, of being stuck inside her own thoughts. Part of her was ready to stop being sad, but the rest of her was trying to pull that little piece of her that was desperate for a bit of light back into the dark clouds. It was starting to drive her crazy, to see her glum face reflected in the endless collections of strange shiny things it was her duty to polish every week.

Quite literally crazy. She was starting to _see_ things.

Or missing them. She wasn’t sure which. She’d left the main hall for only a few seconds to put the kettle on the fire for their evening tea, and when she came back, there suddenly stood a great vase filled with colorful wildflowers, right in the middle of the table. The sight stopped her dead in her tracks, because for a second there, she wasn’t sure whether it had been there all along. It was possible that she’d missed it; she hadn’t exactly been paying attention to her surroundings the last few days, stuck inside her head as she was.

She knew that if she asked Rumplestiltskin, sitting and spinning in his corner as usual, he would mock her to within an inch of her life no matter how she phrased the question. He had let her be sad and quiet and pensive so far, but she knew that if she gave him half the chance, he would be on her with his jokes and his flourishes full force, and she wasn’t sure if she was ready for that just yet.

So, waiting for the water to boil, Belle finished dusting the knickknacks in the display cabinets, the suits of armor flanking the doors and the chairs no-one ever sat on. When she heard the kettle whistle and began to move towards the kitchen, something about those flowers caught her eye yet again, and she paused in the doorway. Hovering. Squinting. Something wasn’t right. There was something different about those flowers, the ones she wasn’t even sure had been there all along. She took a step closer.

They were different flowers!

No, that couldn’t be right. They still looked like the same flowers; she recognized that very tall one that towered over the others, and that one drooping over the edge of the vase, the one with a dozen little horn-shaped flowers, that one looked familiar too. But that tall one was pink before, wasn’t it? Or had it been yellow all along?

The kettle’s whistle was now a piercing scream and she really ought to have taken care of that by now, but those flowers. Those _flowers_. She vaguely heard Rumplestiltskin’s voice coming from the corner of the room, but it was difficult to make out just what he was saying with the kettle and the compelling mystery of the bouquet on the table both demanding her attention.

“Dearie!” he repeated, louder now.

Belle blinked and tore her eyes away from the vase to gawp at him instead. He raised an eyebrow, nodded towards the kitchen and lilted, “Now, I could be mistaken, but do you think the water might have boiled?”

“Oh. Yes… Yes, sorry.”

Was that a smirk she spied just as he turned away towards his wheel again? Then again, her eyes were clearly not to be trusted today, so Belle ignored it and went into the kitchen to silence that dreadful kettle and fix their tea. Two cups, one chipped. There were plenty of cups she hadn’t yet dropped, but she always came back to this one for some reason. Careful not to smash it to smithereens once and for all, Belle carried the tray slowly into the main hall.

… And nearly dropped it when she noticed the daisy in the bouquet of wildflowers was no longer white. In her bewilderment, the cups on her silver tray slid to one side and _clinked_ as they hit the porcelain pot, nearly spilling hot tea on her hand before she saved the day and managed to put the tray down safely after all.

Her heart was beating a little faster, though.

Rumplestiltskin had stood up from his seat at the wheel and made his way over to the table, hands folded behind him, shoulders pushed back, head tilted up just a touch and his eyes burning holes through her skin.

“Do you plan on chipping them all?”

“No! And I didn’t chip…”

She couldn’t be bothered to finish her sentence, because actually, she wasn’t through with those confounding flowers just yet. Were they magical, or had she lost her mind completely? Was that the price of moping in this strange castle with this strange man? Belle even rubbed her eyes in case that would help, but that daisy was definitely purple. Truly, quite splendidly purple. She didn’t know much about plants, but she knew what a daisy looked like, and it could be white, and it could be yellow, but purple?

A slurping sound made her look up and towards Rumplestiltskin, who was peering at her over the rim of the chipped cup.

“Rumplestiltskin?”

“Yes?” he sighed as he sat down in his chair at the table. With a flourish, he summoned a piece of parchment and began to study it with narrowed eyes.

_Have you noticed those flowers changing color at all? Or is that just me?_

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“Good,” he grumbled, never once taking his eyes off whatever was on that parchment. A contract, in all likelihood. Something sinister, to be sure.

Oddly piqued by his blatant lack of interest in what she had to say (she hated it when he refused to satisfy _her_ curiosity) Belle huffed. Well alright, then. She could keep busy too. She had a little tear in a chemise to fix, and she wasn’t very good at it, but she liked to do it herself. Rumplestiltskin always fixed her shoddy workmanship after she’d finished and he never mentioned it, but she knew.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep, she found him sitting in front of the fire with a familiar piece of fabric on his lap, capable fingers working away with needle and thread. No magic. None that she could see, anyway. The memory of him humming in front of the fire with one of her bodices in his lap late at night made her annoyance with him fade away. Because that night, when she’d walked in on him and he’d stopped for a moment, falling silent, Belle knew that he had sensed her presence despite her stealthy approach on her tippy toes. And then he’d just carried on, humming, sewing, letting her sit and read in the warmest room in the castle with him. The fire had made his skin look golden.

Remembering that night, Belle almost felt herself smile for the first time in days. Perhaps she really was ready to stop being sad.

Gathering the little tin boxes of sewing supplies she’d managed to scavenge from various rooms around the castle, Belle sat herself down at the table (in front of the flowers, just in case they weren’t through being strange) and found a thread and a needle in between piles of buttons and pins and all sorts of useful things. With her tea stood steaming in front of her, she set to work on mending that little tear in the soft white cloth.

Belle had grown to like the sound of their quiet moments. Usually it was the sound of the wheel spinning, or the sounds of little glass vials and bottles and bubbling potions being labeled and rearranged, pages in books turned and ancient tunes hummed. Today, it was fingers on parchment and tea spoons in a porcelain cup. Every once in a while, Belle glanced up to see if the flowers had changed again. Sometimes, she caught Rumplestiltskin observing her as she did so, and she was beginning to wonder if he knew about the flowers after all. Really, putting a vase of magical color shifting flowers in the main hall just to see her try to make sense of it wasn’t below him, Belle had come to realize during their time together.

And if that was the case, the thing to do, of course, was to ignore it completely and deny him his fun. She had work to do and those strange flowers weren’t _that_ interesting. She’d seen better tricks from the court jester back home, anyway.

And then, from the corner of her eye, a white wisp caught her attention - so sudden it made her heart jump in her chest. She blinked and turned and saw the steam from her cup of tea… flare up. There was no other way to describe it. White tendrils of steam curled up from the dark liquid and gathered into a shape that took her a little while to make out, blinking against the light of the candle chandelier above the table.

But when it moved away from the light and back down again, she finally saw that it was a bird. A bird! White and wispy and not very detailed, but it definitely had a little head with a beak, and two wings that moved through the air leaving little puffs of steam in their wake. Its tail feathers faded out into a thin sliver of steam that connected it to her cup on the table.

Was the tea magical, too?

No.

_Rumple._

She looked at him and found him utterly charmed by what turned out to be his own trick. His hand was mostly hidden below the table, but she could just make out the tips of his fingers peeking out, moving and guiding his little tea bird up and towards the vaulted ceiling again.

Slowly, Belle began to smile. The flowers. The tea. It was Rumple. So clever and sneaky with the flowers before (never more than a quick glance to gauge her reaction) but _so_ distracted now, grinning up at his bird like a little boy with a kite. Wasn’t this meant to distract _her?_

It seemed Rumplestiltskin had that very same thought at that exact same moment. His pleased little grin disappeared when he noticed that she was staring. Staring, and smiling, and oh so deliciously _on to him._ His fingers froze, his lips parted in surprise, and Belle felt her belly fill with laughter that took her all of her self control to contain, but oh, this was nice, to have caught him unawares like this.

And yet her unexpected victory lost its sheen just a little bit when she glanced up at where she’d last seen the bird and saw nothing. It was gone. She made a little disappointed sound and gave Rumplestiltskin one of the long, pleading looks she usually reserved for when he was about to terrorize a poor and mostly innocent soul. 

“Can you make another one?” she asked with a hopeful smile.

His smile was in his eyes now, clear as day even as he forced his lips into a thin, stern line. And then, with a wave of his fingers, another bird rose from her teacup.

She couldn’t help herself now; this was just too good, too brilliant not to giggle at. The bird flapped its wings slowly and floated behind her head. So she put her sewing on the table, pushed her chair back and stood to keep following it. Slowly, it turned and turned until it had flown a circle around her.

And then it stopped, just floating in mid air right in front of her, and Belle wondered…

Wanting to see what would happen if she touched it, she carefully reached out, making herself giggle again when she realized there was no need to move this slowly. The bird wouldn’t _startle._ But then just as she was about to touch one of its wings, the bird moved up and out of her reach, and Belle was left standing there with her arms outstretched.

“Oh! No! Come back!”

She stood on her toes to try and reach after all, but the bird spiraled up and away from her. Her arms flopping to her sides, she stood there pouting until a deep chuckle reminded her exactly what that bird was. No, _who_ it was.

Rumple was smiling at her. Smirking, almost, but there was too much warmth behind it to really count as a smirk. Belle put her hands on her hips and shook her head, trying to look serious.

“I’m not going to go chasing after it. I’m not a cat.”

“No? Could have fooled me just then, mewling at that bird to come back.”

“I did not mewl!”

While Belle was distracted by the funny feeling conjured up by his cheeky smile, Rumple twisted his fingers just so, so that suddenly, right in front of her, was their little tea bird. Alive and well (in a sense), floating and flapping, just waiting for her to reach out and…

It was warm.

When she slowly drew her hand through the steam bird’s head, it felt warm on her fingers, just like it would have had she held her fingers above her perfectly normal, not enchanted cup of tea on any other day, in any other place, with anyone but the Dark One there to make a little magic trick of it for her amusement.

_For her._

Belle smiled at him, nodding to tell him it was alright to stop using his magic now. Her curiosity satisfied, her fingers warm, she watched as Rumple flew his bird into one of the tapestries on the wall, letting it burst apart and fade away into the woven forest scenery. What a lovely end for a creature that ephemeral, Belle thought.

“The flowers?” she asked absently, still smiling at the tapestry.

From the corner of her eye, she caught a shrug. It was probably as close to an admission as she would get with that one. As he slurped his tea, observing her from behind the cup, Belle gently tapped the petals of one of the flowers that had caught her eye with the tip of her finger. It was a shape she’d never seen before.

“This can’t have been green to begin with, can it? Are there green flowers? What color was this one before?”

Another shrug.

“Can’t remember.”

“Can’t you change it back?”

“I could, dearie,” he sighed, waving his hand dismissively, “if I remembered what color it was.”

“Why would you have to remember?”

No response, just an impossibly grating look Belle knew was meant to make _her_ feel silly. Oh dear, for a clever wizard, he sure did have his slow moments. Belle slid the vase closer to him, then lifted herself up to sit on the table, folding her hands in her lap. Rumplestiltskin looked at her cautiously, narrow eyes flitting from the flowers, to her hands, to her face, over and over again.

“Don’t paint it what you thought it was,” she explained as if to a small child, not without a hint of glee. “Just take your magic away.”

His strange, compelling eyes widened and his lips fell slack, and, “Oh,” he said, pushing his eyebrows close together. “Right. Of course. I knew that.”

Belle rolled her eyes but remained silent, waiting, watching as Rumplestiltskin waved his hand through the air in that elegant way of his, and _poof!_ Gone was the odd green on those delicate little flowers, revealing a bright powder blue color that looked ever so pretty. And the daisy was white again!

Belle gingerly took the blue one by the stem, pulled it out of the vase and held it up in front of her face to study it.

“Do you know what it’s called?”

“I am many things, but a botanist is not one of them.”

“Is there something in the library that might help?”

“You spend more time in there than I do,” he scoffed. “Or than you do cl-”

“Cleaning, yes, I know,” she sighed, wrestling down her smile and putting the flower back where it belonged. “You really must come up with something new.”

Sometimes Rumplestiltskin looked away first. Sometimes she did. Tonight, perhaps because she’d been sad for so long, she was a little softer inside; she was the one who crumbled first.

She reached for her tea. Just the right temperature for her. And she sat there, sipping, legs swinging a bit, shoulders hunched forward, her face warm for some reason. She heard his fingers on the parchment for a little while as he read it, and then when she was very nearly out of tea, he called her name. Very softly.

“Belle?”

She looked up. He seemed concerned about something. In the silence that followed, her _gulp_ as she swallowed her mouthful of tea was fairly obvious.

“Hm?”

“Are you…”

His voice trailed off, and he looked down at his hands, now resting on the edge of the table.

“Are you lonely, here?”

Oh. Oh, she felt even softer now. And for the second time that evening, he was just so boyish to her, with his unsure eyes looking up at her and his fingers twitching nervously against the wood of the table.

He reminded her of the boys that ran around her father’s castle, before the war took them away. They would sometimes bump into her as she crossed the courtyard with her nose in a book, and they would startle and stutter squeaky apologies, wide-eyed and blushing.

But that thought left her completely, that innocent fondness, that doting benevolence changed to something else entirely when she felt herself drawn closer to him by some mysterious force.

Putting her cup on the table, she slipped to the stone floor and then step by step, with her heart beating harder than really it ought to have and biting her lip, she moved closer. Closer. And closer still, until she was standing right next to his chair with her heart still racing but her mind made up. Rumple was watching her closely, curious and uncertain, and in that moment, in that light, his eyes were more golden than she’d ever seen them.

Slowly, even more delicately than with the tea bird before, Belle reached out and moved two fingers that trembled only slightly into his hair, to find his ear. She felt it, warm like the rest of him. Warm like she knew his hand would be. His lips parted now, but he didn’t make a sound.

And then, from behind Rumplestiltskin’s ear, with a smile as steady as she could manage with her heart pounding like that, Belle produced the delicate golden button she’d surreptitiously palmed before she approached him, and held it in front of his adorably bewildered face. Just when his open mouth began to twitch into a surprised smile, Belle took his hand and pressed the button into his palm, folding his fingers over it.

Because he looked like he might drop it.

Because he looked a little shocked.

And Belle loved having stunned him - really, she did - but now she also realized just what she had done. And her face was no longer subtly warm; it was burning up, and her insides had turned liquid and bubbly and _oh_ , she was such a fool!

He was not a boy. He was a man.

“Good night, Rumplestiltskin,” she managed to say without stuttering even once, which was not easy with a name like that.

He watched her, smile still growing, eyes twinkling as she curtsied and hurried out of the room, letting her eyes blow wide open the moment she knew he couldn’t see her anymore.

His hair was soft. She’d only felt it for a few seconds, but it was _so_ soft! Her cheeks burned hot now, and she wanted to grin and grimace, scream and laugh, pull at her hair and hug herself all at the same time. Once she’d made it safely to her room, she fell back against her door with a _thud_ she hoped Rumple hadn’t heard. She pushed her hot face into her hands, muffling a strange squeaky sound her belly told her mouth to make.

This was not normal. This wasn’t normal at all. She was…

Well, she wasn’t _sad_ anymore.


End file.
